I’ve been using alonetone.com to host all of my bad music since… I don’t know when.  2009?  1886?  Something like that.  I used my usual user name, robertjames1971, for my account.  About two years ago I started having problems.  I would upload a new file and it would somehow be marked as private.  No matter what I did, I could never change that setting.  I wasn’t even sure how or why it was set that way.

I got pretty fed up quickly and created a second account, version 2 if you will, and started using that.  Everything was fine.  Until this week.

I uploaded the album-in-a-day thing the other day and happened to notice that three files from the last RPM Challenge were missing.  I know they had problems with their database a while ago and random files vanished.  I thought I was all set with that though.  I guess I wasn’t.

So what to do.  Well, just out of curiosity I tried uploading something to the original account.  It worked.  They did a massive rewrite of the site not long ago and recently took it out of beta and made it final.  So maybe… I just downloaded everything I had on v2 and re-uploaded it to v1.  In doing so, I bombarded the site with new files and sort of flooded everything.  Sorry about that guys.

Last night’s band practice was pretty good.  Specifically, the band was pretty good.  The Lead guitarist?  Not so much.  I couldn’t get out of my own way on most leads.  It was frustrating.  I went into every solo dumbing it down a little from the one before.  I did pull off some pretty sweet feedback tricks though.  All in all I think that goofy album in a day project wore me out a little.  My fingers were still burning a little and I just felt off.

I recorded the practice on my MacBook.  I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but I did learn something interesting.  I didn’t bring my charger with me.  I usually don’t.  Practice is two hours long and even though GarageBand eats up power like a crazy person, I can make it through two hours with plenty of juice to spare.  That, however, was before upgrading to Catalina.    Last night the battery was down to 1% with 20 minutes left to go.  Ouch.   I guess I’m bringing the charger from now on.  I’m just not sure I have a free plug.

In honor of That Pedal Show doing an all OCD show, here are my two OCDs because I’m king nerd.

A Hipstamatic double exposure without the Hipstamatic filters.

Artsy mutha.

I’ve recently been monkeying about with my pedal boards, as usual. I’ve reintroduced an old favorite noisy little bastard onto the band board. I’m referring to the Fulltone OCD overdrive pedal. I also spent a chunk of today playing around with my newly acquired custom shop, limited edition Fulltone OCD GE pedal as well. It’s an OCD bonanza ’round these parts.

Then wouldn’t you know it, That Pedal Show released an OCD video today! They had a v1.7, the recently released v2, and the Ge. I think my pedal is a v1.4 but I’m not 100% sure.

It’s always nice when TPS jumps on a wagon that I’m already on. It’s like guitar junkie validation.

Enjoy.

The visual representation of an Apple Watch user’s long, long day….

When was it… 2008?  2009?  At some point in the long distant past, Google and I spent an evening looking for songwriting challenges.  I knew about RPM and FAWM, but that night also clued me in to songfight and NaSoAlMo and 50/90.  There was one other challenge too, that I had never completed.  I tried it once or twice before, but never got far.

Until today.

It’s the album in a day challenge and it can be found here.  It looks like that page hasn’t had an update since 2008 or so, but I never forgot about it.  I had a vacation day today and knew I was going to have a good chunk of time with the house to myself so I figured today was the day.  I started on my iPad last night (Thursday 10/10/19) at 8:00 pm.  I finished mixing the last song (which is just a minute or so of noise) at 7:59 pm tonight (Friday 10/11/19).

My fingers were toast by around 11:00 this morning, and my ears were fried completely by 1:00 this afternoon.  I have no idea if any of this sounds even remotely listenable.  There might be one or two songs that are worth taking a second look at some day in the future, but that’s it.  Two, maybe three or these songs are utter garbage and I’m embarrassed to put my name on them.  Yippee!!

The challenge sets the rules at 20 minutes of brand spanking new music, or 30 songs.  It actually recommends doing 30 really short songs, but I wanted to stick to my usual lame song structures which means 2-5 minutes.  Soundcloud tells me I’m at 21:03, but the last minute or so of that is just noise.  I wanted something really quick that would put me over the top if I needed it.  Ain’t I a stinker?

Here you go.  Here comes the pain.

I believe today is the official 50th birthday of Progressive Rock.

50 years ago today King Crimson’s first album, In the Court of the Crimson King, was released on the unsuspecting universe and the genre we now know as Prog was born.

I gave the album a birthday spin.

Happy Birthday, Prog.

I’ve been messing with the new Apple Music app for MacOS over the last couple of days.  Basically it is the functionality from the old iTunes that handled the mp3 player, the file structure, and Apple Music.  Everything works, but good heavens it is the slowest thing I’ve used since the dawn of broadband connection speeds.  It is unbelievably slow.  Apple Music is a complete mess.  You click For You, or Browse, and then you wait an eternity for the screen to draw.  It’s amazing how slow it is.

Is it just me?

Why didn’t anyone tell me that Robert Fripp and David Cross made an album together in 2015?  50% of the Starless and Bible Black King Crimson lineup made an album based on a theme and variation of the melody to the Crimson song “Starless”?